Arizona has decided to let private companies bid on creating a new prison, despite the fact that privately run prisons are actually more expensive than state-run ones. But that little fact is secondary to the most important problem with any state-run enterprise: No one gets rich off of it. (See also: Why we have healthcare “reform” that features an individual mandate and no public option, much less single payer)

AP did their best to try to make the alternative to Social Security benefit cuts sound as unappealing as possible, asking people if they would rather “raise taxes” than cut benefits, but their respondents still preferred that to cutting benefits by a 53-36 margin.

Now imagine what that margin would be if they had asked about keeping the rate the same but raising or eliminating the cap on the payroll tax cap so that the rich pay the same effective rate as everyone else. Too bad that seems to be almost a taboo subject, probably because the fix is in.

Now, here’s another person who’s existing in a dream. Who on top of that is a kind of butcher, who’s committing a kind of familial murder, because when he comes out of that room he psychically kills us by taking us into a dream world, where we become confused and frightened.

You almost have to admire the GOP’s courage in staking out a position that, if not exactly pro-rape, is not entirely anti-rape either. And emphatically not pro-rape victim. So far, I’ve counted three ways in which Republicans act as rape apologists:

1) De-legitimizing rape: In essence, Republicans believe that, come on, not all rapes are really rapes. That if it doesn’t involve a knife or a gun or physical force, well, it’s only rape in some abstract technical sense – it’s more like a date that just got a little out of control. It’s not only Todd Akin talking about “legitimate rape” as if there’s such a thing as fake rape, but most of the House Republican caucus, which tried to limit the rape exemption for abortion coverage to include only “forcible rape” last year.

(To their credit, the GOP has come up with an elegant way to eliminate this awkward rape caste system: Their 2012 platform calls for a constitutional amendment that would ban all abortions, with no rape exemption for anyone. So now all rapes are illegitimate. See also: Voting against the Franken bill to sever ties with contractors that force employees to settle on-the-job rape cases through an arbitrator.)

2) Minimizing the impact: This is similar to the first, but is more about the aftermath. Essentially, Republicans are claiming that rape victims rarely get pregnant. Again, you have Todd Akin’s now-famous claim that “legitimate rape” victims can “shut that whole thing down,” whatever that means. But you also have Rep. Steve King implying that statutory rape and incest victims (which I’m assuming Akins would not consider “legitimate rape”) don’t get pregnant either.

The funny thing about this line of argument is that it’s deployed as a justification for denying abortion exemptions to rape victims. But if they never get pregnant, why worry about the exemption at all? Oh right, because of all the abortion queens who will falsely cry rape just so they can have more abortions. Damn those abortion queens.

3) Accentuating the positive: This is the most perverse of all. You have Mike Huckabee going on about all the wonderful people who are the children of rape, and Missouri Republican Sharon Barnes saying, “if God has chosen to bless this person with a life, you don’t kill it.” I’m pretty sure most rape victims are not going to view their rape baby as an awesome parting gift, especially if they end up looking into the eyes of their rapist every day for 18 or more years.

Of course, it doesn’t really matter, since if they were legitimately raped, they wouldn’t be pregnant anyway, right?

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that there is a fundamental difference between the way normal people and Republicans perceive rape. Normal people think of rape as a soul-shattering assault, while Republicans appear to think of it as unwanted and not-particularly-good sex. At most, they may view it as something like a punch in the face, where the victim is completely back to normal once they recover from the shock and the pain.

Frankly, the only way I can think of to make Republicans as anti-rape as the rest of us is for Obama to declare that he’s for it.

I really should have posted these when they immediately came to mind, and a lot of this ground has been covered elsewhere, but here goes anyway. In roughly chronological order:

1) Hello GOP base, goodbye everyone else.

2) This is such a repellent combination that it will probably damage Republican candidates downticket.

3) It will put the giant magnifying glass of a presidential campaign squarely on the Ryan budget, which will further damage any downticket Republicans who supported it.

4) The scrutiny of his budget will also have a huge impact on Ryan himself, who will find his reputation changing from “bright young up-and-coming Republican star with Serious Ideas about the economy and stuff” to “the guy who wants to kill Medicare”. He will have a very similar arc to Sarah Palin’s from superstar to albatross, though not for the same reasons.

5) The downticket effects make it very hard for me to believe that this is some kind of diabolical strategy to throw the election so that Obama and the Democrats will take the fall for the effects of Republican obstruction. I think Mitt really is this delusional and/or afraid of his own base.

I wonder if this will be the first presidential election where a majority of voters cast their votes against a candidate they hate rather than for a candidate they like. Or maybe all elections are like that, in which case I still think 2012 will mark an all-time high.

I suppose Mitt’s choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate might induce more base Republicans to vote for him, but it’ll also induce almost everyone else to vote against him.

Funny how the people who argue that corporations will do the right thing in the absence of regulation and government oversight are usually the same people who believe that atheists can’t be moral without the fear of divine retribution.

Although it would probably be an exaggeration to say that I’m rooting for Obama, I’m loving what Harry Reid has done to Romney with his accusation that Mitt is trying to hide the fact that he didn’t pay any taxes. At this point there is really no good outcome for Romney. I can only think of four possible scenarios, and all of them are bad:

1) Mitt finally releases his returns, and Harry Reid is proven right.

2) Mitt finally releases his returns, and it turns out he was hiding something even worse.

3) Mitt finally releases his returns, and there’s nothing really damaging, thus demonstrating that while he may not be a tax cheat, he’s also even more stupid and arrogant than we thought (which is a lot). Especially if this is some kind of deliberate rope-a-dope strategy to bait the Obama camp into making more and more outlandish claims that would make them look foolish when proven wrong, because I don’t really see it playing out that way.

4) Mitt never releases his returns, resulting in continuous speculation as to what he’s hiding, all the way up to Election Day.

#3 is definitely the least bad out of the four, but it would still leave everyone wondering what the hell is wrong with this guy.